A passage from my essay "Mondi of the Mind", reflections on a walk through the mondi - the dense shrubbery - in the Christoffel Park, on Seri Bientu, in 2020 – as published in the journal "Kristof", 2020
(...) The Christoffel Park was established over an area of 2,300 hectares, covering not just the highest “mountain” on the island, but all its surrounding hills (…). This was in 1978, long after I left the island, but on my yearly visits, (…), my brother Fred and I would wander through the mondi in this large park, climbing the Christoffel off-trail from every possible side (…)
The borders of the park gave us a sense of security to explore the mondi without the danger of trespassing on private property and being challenged by an enraged owner with a shotgun. Moreover, in the park, there was much less chance of being mugged, as violent attackers – a growing phenomenon on the island – would likely stick to the city, and not be found wandering in this difficult terrain.
Within those borders, mondi-walking is perhaps also a way of crossing borders – to cut a path where it is hard to get through, where the mondi is “closed” – the mondi será. The idea that I can go across something that is closed is an act of crossing boundaries that provides a sense of freedom, a sense that no rules can stop you.
In a way, entering into the mondi is, for me, an act of reclaiming the forbidden domain where, as a little girl, I was warned never to tread because of all the dangers lurking in the dark, dense shrubbery. Boys were not cautioned about these dangers; they enjoyed the freedom to wander into the mondi and shoot iguanas with a slingshot.
Making my way across the mondi symbolizes, for me, the blazing of my own trail on this little island where all the ways were set, where social behavior was strictly controlled while I was growing up, particularly for women. Even – or rather, especially – for the more privileged among us.
On another level, this need to explore the countryside parallels my need to explore the secrets of the past, to unearth the truth about the island’s social hierarchies and their unspoken rules that keep everyone in their place – something that has always grabbed me as a child. To explore is to find out for yourself, without asking, without a guide who shows you the way, who gives you the answers.
Secrets, too, have a boundary, a boundary that the curious among us desire to cross, in order to partake of forbidden knowledge. Yet some of the island’s secrets are not forbidden knowledge, for they are known to all. What is forbidden it to speak them out loud, such as secret knowledge about the brua, the local voodoo-like practices; about the tambu, the ecstatic drum dance that was still forbidden by law in my childhood, and most of all, about the yu dj’afó – the illegitimate, or ‘outside children’, a fact of life that was so commonplace in the patriarchal colonial society in which I grew up – itself an act of crossing the borders of race and class, afforded to privileged white men.
And the shadow of slavery still hovers over these hills – in ruins of plantation houses with slave-bell pillars, in what was believed to be the tiny cells where rebellious slaves were incarcerated. The impenetrable mondi around the Christoffel would have provided shelter and temporary freedom for the enslaved who had escaped from the nearby plantations during the Great Slave Rebellion in 1795. In my youth, the knowledge of slavery was, in some ways, a kind of dark, open secret that was shoved into history books, allowing descendants of slave-owners to distance themselves from all traces of a social order erected by their ancestors.
The etymology of the word ‘mondi’ is a question of speculation. It might come from the Spanish and Portuguese ‘monte’ which means mountain – and which can also refer to ‘forest’, in regions where mountains are forested. Similarly, to Curaçao’s ‘seru’ (mountain) that is covered with ‘mondi’ (forest) – to play with the ambiguity of the word and its aggrandizement on this small island.
But I prefer to think of the consonants that link mondi to mundu – meaning “world” – as to me, entering the mondi is a total immersion into an entirely different world. It is perhaps to lose the way, and then, unexpectedly, to come upon an elusive deer drinking from a puddle in a gully that just filled with water from yesterday’s rain.
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